DOTINGA: Art Linkletter's SD radio days

Before there was a KGB in the Soviet Union, there was a KGB in
San Diego.

And before there was a famous celebrity named Art Linkletter,
there was a decidedly non-famous young radio host on KGB named Art
Linkletter.

KGB and Linkletter: these are their stories. Chung CHUNG! (Oh,
sorry, got into "Law & Order" mode there for a minute.)

Linkletter ---- who got his start in broadcasting in San Diego
---- died last week at the age of 97. He got his start here, where
he fudged the truth during a national broadcast and found himself
distracted on the air by amorous sailors in a downtown hotel.

But first, some background.

Linkletter, who was born in the awesome-sounding Saskatchewan
town of Moose Jaw, landed in San Diego as a child with the family
who adopted him. He ended up attending San Diego High School and
San Diego State College (now SDSU). While in college in the early
1930s, Linkletter impressed a professor with his ability to read
papers aloud. The professor recommended him to the manager of KGB,
who hired Linkletter to fill a part-time announcer job when he was
only a junior.

"I don't recall ever being nervous at the microphone,"
Linkletter wrote in his 1980 biography, "I Didn't Do It Alone." "I
gave my first station break on the half-hour, 'This is KGB, San
Diego,' and settled back in the announce booth as if I'd been there
all my life."

He had a lot to do, much more than today's disc jockeys, who
often record their on-air bits long before their shows go on the
air.

"I gave station breaks, read commercials creating my own
background sound effects, did newscasts and played records," he
wrote, and that wasn't all.

He also anchored newscasts, often clipping stories out of the
newspaper. (Some things never change.) Then there were the remote
broadcasts, which were the height of excitement in the radio world
at the time. In his biography, Linkletter recalled how he stretched
the truth during one such broadcast, committing a sin that would
probably get him fired from any broadcast newsroom today.

It was 1935, in the middle of the Depression, and a fair called
the San Diego Exposition had hit town. To make a splash, the city
invited the Navy's Pacific Fleet to drop by. As a nationwide
audience listened on the CBS Radio Network, Linkletter stood at a
dockside microphone and described the ships as they came in to the
harbor ---- the destroyers, the light and heavy cruisers, and the
battleships. And there were more details, about the sailors on
board and an admiral's flag.

"Nationally we were a smash," Linkletter wrote.

The only problem: He hadn't seen a single one of the ships. A
dense fog had socked in the bay, and those ships had not come in.
They remained offshore when Linkletter went off the air, confusing
those who lived near the ocean and could see the fog. Some were
mad, he wrote, but they "didn't appreciate the demands of network
radio."